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Grex > Agora47 > #208: Does grex need to improve or is it perfect? | |
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| Author |
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| 25 new of 52 responses total. |
gelinas
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response 25 of 52:
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Dec 6 03:12 UTC 2003 |
I see no reason to remove conferences. My conference list includes many that
get fewer than a response a year. And it does not include many others that
are probably far more active. I don't (much) care if someone says something
in jellyware every other minute. I do care if someone says something in
rialto.
Ce'st la vie.
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gelinas
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response 26 of 52:
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Dec 6 03:16 UTC 2003 |
BTW, there are also items I follow in a couple of different conferences.
For example, I read the System Problems items in both agora and helpers.
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lorance
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response 27 of 52:
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Dec 6 04:36 UTC 2003 |
I personally like Grex the way it is. Sure it's slow at times, but so is my
connection. I love reading the conferences and am now finally participating.
I would become a member just to support Grex if I could afford it. But since
I can't even afford a Net connection of my own it will have to wait.
It would be nice to see a little less bickering. I support the staff whole
hartedly. They get too much greif for the ammount of work they do at no pay!
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twenex
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response 28 of 52:
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Dec 6 10:31 UTC 2003 |
I'm not sure that I want GREX to be a museum,
but it's certainly interesting (only for a
relative newcomer, perhaps) to be able to see the
"evolution" of the system. Deleting old confs
also means someone(s) has/have to sit down and
decide which confs to delete, and any arbitrary
date you can think of is bound to raise
objections. ALso, making the case ofor making the
space is a bit incongruous when we're waiting for
a new system with more space. The economics of
the PC market are such that any new upgrade to
give us jmore space, if timely made, is likely to
be more cost effective per unit of bytes than the
last one, whilst people's time generaly gets more
wexpensive over time, not cheaper (fi you work it
out based on the amount of $ you would get if you
were working at GREX "professionally"). Getting
rid of cruft sounds like a good idea, but on top
of all the above, you open yourself up to the
temptation to "modernise" the system even more by
ading this, that and the other, which again is
expensive in administratio time and could very
well turn out to be a boondoggle. The one thing
I'd like to see GREX add - X - is not likely to
be added anyway, given the impracticality of
using it over dialup and telnet aaround Michigan,
never mind on some b ox somewhere over the
Rainbow, er, Atlantic. What might be more useful
is to see what, if any, changes are made to our
work environment on NextGREX, and then figuring
out, perhaps at a board meeting or series
thereof, what other changes that haven't already
happened need to be made in order to turn our
new system into "out beloved old system", or
improve it where it's generally agreed that GREX
sucked.
Remember - people have been using hte wheel and
axle essentially unchanged for thousands of
years!
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mynxcat
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response 29 of 52:
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Dec 6 12:04 UTC 2003 |
Jeff, when you said "the one item I'd like to see GREX add - X - " Were you
being rhetorical, or did you have something in mind?
I'm torn between cleaning up the conferences and leaving them the way they
are like. Like Richard, I can see new users trying the one of the defunct
conferences and finding no activity, giving up on the system. Like the others,
I like the historical fator of having them around.
Ine onferenc I would like to see maintained is the archives, where all the
best items are linked so it's easy to find them later. It's sadly out of date
and I'm sure there were a lot more items after that that deserve t obe linked
there.
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russ
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response 30 of 52:
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Dec 6 16:26 UTC 2003 |
Re #17: Try using Pine instead of Mail; Pine handles
attachments in a reasonably-sane manner, though I think its
pager leaves a huge amount to be desired.
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twenex
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response 31 of 52:
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Dec 7 00:26 UTC 2003 |
I meant X as in ther X Window System, which is the graphical part of UNIX.
Russ: did you mean to mention that bit about X in the demographics item here,
instead?
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mynxcat
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response 32 of 52:
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Dec 7 01:25 UTC 2003 |
Aaah. Ok, thanks
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jmsaul
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response 33 of 52:
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Dec 7 01:33 UTC 2003 |
I think the best way to deal with the huge number of conferences would be to
have a command that shows you which conferences have had recent activity.
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richard
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response 34 of 52:
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Dec 7 01:51 UTC 2003 |
why couldn't all the dead conferenes be put in a seperate section, with a
separate menu, and then only keep live current conferences in the main menu.
A picospan I and picospan II
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gelinas
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response 35 of 52:
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Dec 7 02:01 UTC 2003 |
Probably because we can't agree on what is "dead," richard.
Yes, some way of getting a list of
all conferences
and
conferences with "recent" activity
would be useful.
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mynxcat
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response 36 of 52:
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Dec 7 02:04 UTC 2003 |
There isn't really a "dead" conference, only dormant ones. All conferences
can be revived if given enough time and activity. (Unless you can freeze a
whole conference?)
I like the idea of being able to view the conferences with recent activity.
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rcurl
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response 37 of 52:
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Dec 7 04:23 UTC 2003 |
Of what significance is it to a user that a conference is "active" or not
if the subject of the conference is of no interest - and if it is, any
user can make that conference active?
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mynxcat
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response 38 of 52:
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Dec 7 12:55 UTC 2003 |
The concern with the dormant conferences is that when a new user reads through
them and sees that the last post was sometimes in 1999, and further, if he
comes across ultiple conferences like these, he's apt to dismiss the whole
of bbs as a dead feature that is no longer used.
Also - can we do something about the conferences who's FW's ar eno longer grex
users? Either give them toother FW's or retire them or something?
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jmsaul
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response 39 of 52:
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Dec 7 15:59 UTC 2003 |
I'd suggest an option that lets you get a list of the top ten conferences in
terms of activity, when you log in. I suspect that would drive more traffic
out to those conferences.
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remmers
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response 40 of 52:
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Dec 7 17:25 UTC 2003 |
M-Net tried that at one point. How did it work out?
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rcurl
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response 41 of 52:
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Dec 7 19:38 UTC 2003 |
Anyone that enters a new and interesting post in almost any item in almost
any conference, no matter how old the last response was, will get a
response back. What does create a little humor is a response to an
obsolete subject, but few newusers do that.
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jmsaul
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response 42 of 52:
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Dec 8 01:57 UTC 2003 |
Re #40: It had a slight effect for the brief period we did it, but the main
problem is that it was manually generated every week or so (Leeron
might remember, because I think he generated it). I'm talking about
something that's automatic and up to the minute -- similar to how
some web-based BBSes (e.g. phpBB) list threads in order of most
recent activity.
Incidentally, phpBB blows the doors off Backtalk, but I don't know
whether it would scale for the number of conferences and items Grex
or M-Net has. I suspect it wouldn't, because the one php site I've
seen with a truly massive amount of content was very slow.
Anyway -- have it generated automatically, viewable at login and
on demand, and see what happens.
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bhoward
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response 43 of 52:
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Dec 8 02:18 UTC 2003 |
Yep, that is the sort of thing I was getting at in item 19 (response 139,146).
Better tools to help people know where the action is on a given day.
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jp2
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response 44 of 52:
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Dec 8 03:43 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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aruba
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response 45 of 52:
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Dec 8 15:58 UTC 2003 |
Re #23 (tod): To get your session to drop when you log out, instead of going
back to the login prompt, put the line
/--------------------------\
| stty hupcl |
| /----------------------\ |
| | in your .login file. | |
| \----------------------/ |
\--------------------------/
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jp2
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response 46 of 52:
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Dec 8 16:09 UTC 2003 |
This response has been erased.
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gull
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response 47 of 52:
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Dec 8 17:03 UTC 2003 |
Re resp:29: I'd hate to see old stuff weeded out. I find the old
discussions in the micros conference really interesting, for example.
It's easy to forget what things were like when 386 desktops were new and
cost $10,000. ;>
Re resp:34: Part of the problem is conferences that appear dead are
often just dormant. A lot of conferences that don't get much activity
are in my cflist. They might be dormant for months but then someone
will post something that sparks a lively discussion. If you move
conferences like that to the "dead pile" you just kill them off by
ensuring they'll never be active again.
Re resp:38: I'm not sure how anyone could get the idea that bbs is dead
that way, seeing as they generally have to come in through agora first.
I think the current scheme of having a main conference that gets rolled
over on a regular basis to stay fresh, and a bunch of other conferences
that mostly archive their content forever, is a pretty good one. I
think what richard has is a solution looking for a problem.
We aren't, incidentally, the only site that works this way. LiveJournal
does not remove dormant journals. They move them to a seperate cluster,
for load balancing reasons, but they're still accessable.
Way back up there someone suggested SSL support for the web interface.
I'd like to see that, too, but we'd have to think carefully about the
performance impact. It may be a bit steep even for NextGrex.
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katie
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response 48 of 52:
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Dec 8 22:32 UTC 2003 |
HOw do I change to pine?
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gelinas
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response 49 of 52:
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Dec 8 22:49 UTC 2003 |
Try "pine" at the % prompt.
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